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If the thought of heavyweight Toronto dance-music duo MSTRKRFT playing a legendary rock ’n’ roll outpost like the Horseshoe Tavern for North by Northeast instead of some gaudy mega-club gives you pause, well, that’s the point.

MSTRKRFT masterminds Jesse Keeler and Al-P specifically sought out a “non-nightclub venue” in which to give local admirers a first taste of their new album, Operator.

“Back when we first started to play, Mikey Apples and Jaime Sin had a regular DJ night at the Queenshead Pub at Queen and Bathurst, and they were playing a lot of really cool stuff — some Italo, some New York disco stuff — and they would invite us to play,” recalls Al-P (né Alex Puodziukas). “We would play European big-room progressive house or a demo that we’d just left the studio with that night, and playing that kind of music in, like, a full-on pub where everyone’s drinking pints of beer, there was something really interesting about that duality. And I think that might have been part of the reason we were so excited about playing this sort of music at a place like that again.”

The acid-streaked Operator, out July 22 via Last Gang Records, is a much more brutish, raw and nasty affair than its two predecessors, The Looks (2006) and Fist of God (2009). It’s definitely more suited to crusty warehouses in Detroit and Chicago at the dawn of the ’90s than the massive clubs and festivals MSTRKRFT has grown accustomed to playing over the past 10 years, and therefore extra-definitely not the sort of thing one expects to hear booming from the PA on a Tuesday night at a rock ’n’ roll haunt like the ’Shoe.

The Horseshoe, mind you, has a proud punk history and there’s a fair bit of “punk” to Operator’s caustic dance-floor tantrums. MSTRKRFT isn’t as out of place there as you might think, perhaps because Keeler — also the bass-playing half of hair-raising Toronto hard-rock duo Death From Above 1979 — and Al-P are self-described “old punks” moving in electronic circles who sought to recreate some of that “live” energy in the studio this time around.

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They left the computer “off in the corner recording,” says Keeler, and limited themselves to analogue gear during the long making of Operator, which basically involved the two old friends jamming away on their many electronic doodads for hundreds of hours and, as Al-P puts it, “chasing certain feels.” They were looking for “stuff that we liked and emotionally responded to; that was the extent of the planning, really,” says Keeler.

“When you’re working so heavily in a computer, and you’re old punks and you’re musicians, and you want to be musical, sometimes it feels like the gap between those two things is too far,” he says. “Obviously, there are kids who are accustomed to using the computer for everything and for them it’s no big deal, but for us it’s still new. So we would just play live. We would just get together, hit ‘record’ and start playing, recording everything. . .

“Al was just saying there’s another couple records already recorded amongst what we had, but with Operator we wanted to make an album, not just a bunch of the same stuff. We wanted to show the range of what we’ve been making and make something we really wanted to listen to from beginning to end. I don’t know if I’ve ever made a record that I’ve listened to as much as I’ve listened to this one, personally.”

Recording live, of course, means that MSTRKRFT can now tour behind Operator playing live onstage instead of hitting the road as a DJ duo.

They’re still “touring with essentially every piece that we used to make the record,” says Al-P, but they’ve found efficiencies in the setup to make it manageable.

“In the past, people would ask us to perform live and we’d always shy away from it because it would have to be a compromise,” he says “We knew we weren’t going to be able to bring enough stuff to achieve the level of production of our previous records, so it would always have been a compromise. But if you just start with what you’re going to use live and limit yourself to that, you can always recreate it, to an extent. It allows you to have the palette that people are used to hearing on the record right in front of you. And then it’s about, ‘How do we maximize the effect of what we have in front of us?’”

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